Teams Need Help, but Phil Jackson Stays on the Perimeter

By HARVEY ARATON

May 23, 2013

RIDGEWOOD, N.J. — On book tour, Phil Jackson is an inveterate news media flirt, a trending tweet waiting to happen.

He is a Zen master at dispensing tidbits of mass interest, without great elaboration or detail. Buy Jackson’s latest book, “Eleven Rings” (Penguin Press), and perhaps in those pages the harmonic flow of his past, present and future will be revealed.

On Wednesday evening, while a long line of purchasers waited outside Bookends on Ridgewood’s main commercial street, Jackson volunteered another nugget of intrigue to the continuing obsession with his employment status.

Asked if he had ever spoken with Michael Jordan about a possible reunion in Charlotte, he said, yes, in fact, he had. But it was in that playful Jacksonian way that slams the door on a budding issue before reopening it just a crack.

“Last year when he was searching for a coach, we talked about it,” he said. “We talked a little bit about what he was looking for. I had a couple of people I could recommend to him. He said, ‘You’re not interested in this, are you?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not, I can’t do that right now.’ ”

Jordan, the Charlotte team’s controlling owner, went from inquiring about the most credentialed coach alive to hiring the virtually unknown Mike Dunlap, who lasted one season, another dreadful one for the Bobcats under Jordan’s ownership.

Asked Wednesday why someone who is perceived to have achieved everything in the sport (2 rings as a player and 11, a record, as a head coach) would want to return in any capacity, Jackson said: “I think some of it is just the influence from my close friends — Jeanie Buss, Kurt Rambis, Jim Cleamons — that you should not stay away from the game because your influence is needed and brings another element to the game of basketball.

“So in watching the game evolve, there’s quite a difference philosophically in the way it’s played now and the way I coached. One of my former players, Stevie Kerr, said he would love to see the effect you would have in present-day basketball, and seeing you coach big guys like Pau and Howard,” referring to Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard, “because the game today is basically screen, roll and 3-point shooting.”

Parsing Jackson’s words would seem to suggest existential conflict. Just when he thinks he is out, his friends try to pull him back in. Certainly, the Lakers’ coaching choice of Mike D’Antoni over him early this season — on tour, Jackson in effect called it laughable — was insulting enough to keep hope alive in Los Angeles for Jackson to return someday.

Jackson has recently been helping the Detroit Pistons conduct a coaching search and, he said, a group that failed in its bid to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to Seattle offered him his choice of jobs.

Phil Jackson, right, with the Lakers executive Jeanie Buss.

Ray Stubblebine / Reuters

But it would seem that Jordan, most of all, could use someone who has actually succeeded in a nonplaying role in what these simpatico former Chicago allies routinely refer to as “the game of basketball.”

“I’m not going to comment on him desperately needing someone to guide it, but they haven’t found a way yet to produce good basketball teams,” Jackson said. “You know, Michael has hired a lot of friends to be in that organization.”

This is never a good idea, Jackson recalled the Bulls and White Sox owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, telling him while they watched a spring training game not long ago.

“Jerry said, ‘You have to be able to have a general manager who you can have arguments with about organizational things,’ ” Jackson said.

Granted, it is a reach to think that Jordan’s ego would allow him to turn over control of his organization to Jackson or that Jackson would trade his celebrity life in Los Angeles to spend much of the year in Charlotte.

But Jackson could serve Jordan less as a friend and more as the spiritual adviser he became — in addition to coach — when Jordan was struggling to climb beyond the perception of him as a spectacular solo act.

What are Jackson’s credentials to evaluate talent anywhere beyond his enormous success in motivating and deploying it? He did call the Knicks’ roster clumsy long before it proved to be just that in a six-game series defeat against the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Jackson considers Carmelo Anthony “an amazing ballplayer who still has another level to step up.” But given a choice, he seemed to prefer Brooklyn’s roster to New York’s because of the age of the Knicks and the presence of the Nets’ Deron Williams and Brook Lopez.

“The Knicks still have to find some accommodating group of guys that know how to play ball together, move the ball, play the game the right way,” he said. “With Brooklyn, if you’ve got a point guard and a solid center, or a good point guard and a great center, you’ve got two of the pieces that you want to have toward a champion.”

Jackson may or may not have full-time work anytime soon. But as pro basketball’s reigning Buddha, he will remain perched on the perimeter of teams everywhere, a phone call away from another round of X and O suggestion and self-examination.

“There’s that kind of juxtaposition to the norm, and I’ve always been intrigued, being out there on the edge and a little bit of a maverick,” he said.

Maverick, of course, being the title of his first book, published in 1975 and forever holding out the possibility of past as prelude.